Turn on Developer Site in Office 365

by | Feb 24, 2014 | Development | 4 comments

One of our tasks as SharePoint developers is SharePoint Apps development. It’s recommended approach by Microsoft when we create solutions for Office 365 and to do this we need to turn on a Developer Site in Office 365. For this purpose, Microsft provides us Office 365 Developer Subscription, and there we can create site collections, base on “developer site collection” template. Sometimes we have to work on standard site, but when we check SharePoint site settings there’s no feature to turn on Developer Site in Office 365. Of course, it’s very easy to do this if we run SharePoint on-premise, but in the case of a cloud environment, it’s not so easy. Or rather I should wrote it wasn’t… A few days ago I was looking for a solution to some problem and I discovered a great project on CodePlex, called SharePoint Client Browser for SharePoint 2010 and 2013. After download, we get a browser of our site and after logging on we can see all possible features:

SharePoint Client Browser
SharePoint Client Browser

As you can we have all possible information in one place. And now something awesome. If you click with right mouse button on your site name, you will see option to run PowerShell with CSOM. That’s right!

PowerShell For Office 365
PowerShell For Office 365

Let me say it’s so simple to run PowerShell against Office 365 site… And let go back to our developer site. When we start PowerShell consoler for the first time we will get a couple of information about a few available  parameters to use:

SharePoint PowerShell
SharePoint PowerShell

Now with this information we can just wrote a few lines of code:

$ctx.Load($ctx.Site);
$ctx.ExecuteQuery();
$guid = [System.Guid]”e374875e-06b6-11e0-b0fa-57f5dfd72085″
$ctx.Site.Features.Add($guid,$true,[Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.FeatureDefinitionScope]::None)
$ctx.ExecuteQuery();

Small remark. That GUID is provided by Microsoft and it’s linked to Developer Site in Office 365.

Written by Tomasz Szulczewski

Hi, my name is Tomasz Szulczewski, and I have been in love with information technology for over 25 years, but I still have an IT passion and feel like a geek. I am a person who is problem solver who thinks that not all people must be experts in IT.

Related Posts

Google API Error: invalid_client

401. That’s an error. Error: invalid_client For one of my clients I have to build very  simple website to host it in Azure. By the way Azure rocks! I love it and soon I will write at last a few post about it :). Anyway one of the requirement was that the site should...

read more

4 Comments

  1. Sylar

    Hi Sir, after enabled Developer Site Collection feature the site will having a few additional quick link for e.g “Developer Center, Samples” and default homepage will be set to DevHome.aspx. When I disabled the features, the site default page and quick link will be remain as is. How do I remove the links and default homepage as previous?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.